A stigmergy-based analysis of city hotspots to discover trends and anomalies in urban transportation usage

A key aspect of a sustainable urban transportation system is the effectiveness of transportation policies. To be effective, a policy has to consider a broad range of elements, such as pollution emission, traffic flow, and human mobility. Due to the complexity and variability of these elements in the urban area, to produce effective policies remains a very challenging task. With the introduction of the smart city paradigm, a widely available amount of data can be generated in the urban spaces. Such data can be a fundamental source of knowledge to improve policies because they can reflect the sustainability issues underlying the city. In this context, we propose an approach to exploit urban positioning data based on stigmergy, a bio-inspired mechanism providing scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. By employing stigmergy, samples in proximity with each other are aggregated into a functional structure called trail. The trail summarizes relevant dynamics in data and allows matching them, providing a measure of their similarity. Moreover, this mechanism can be specialized to unfold specific dynamics. Specifically, we identify high-density urban areas (i.e hotspots), analyze their activity over time, and unfold anomalies. Moreover, by matching activity patterns, a continuous measure of the dissimilarity with respect to the typical activity pattern is provided. This measure can be used by policy makers to evaluate the effect of policies and change them dynamically. As a case study, we analyze taxi trip data gathered in Manhattan from 2013 to 2015.Comment: Preprin

BUSINESS INTELLIGENT AGENTS FOR ENTERPRISE APPLICATION

Fierce competition in a market increasingly crowded and frequent changes in consumer requirements are the main forces that will cause companies to change their current organization and management. One solution is to move to open architectures and virtual type, which requires addressing business methods and technologies using distributed multi-agent systems. Intelligent agents are one of the most important areas of artificial intelligence that deals with the development of hardware and software systems able to reason, learn to recognize natural language, speak, make decisions, to recognize objects in the working environment etc. Thus in this paper, we presented some aspects of smart business, intelligent agents, intelligent systems, intelligent systems models, and I especially emphasized their role in managing business processes, which have become highly complex systems that are in a permanent change to meet the requirements of timely decision making. The purpose of this paper is to prove that there is no business without using the integration Business Process Management, Web Services and intelligent agents.business intelligence, intelligent agents, intelligent systems, management, enterprise, web services

BCAS: A Web-enabled and GIS-based Decision Support System for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Breast Cancer

For decades, geographical variations in cancer rates have been observed but the precise determinants of such geographic differences in breast cancer development are unclear. Various statistical models have been proposed. Applications of these models, however, require that the data be assembled from a variety of sources, converted into the statistical models’ parameters and delivered effectively to researchers and policy makers. A web-enabled and GIS-based system can be developed to provide the needed functionality. This article overviews the conceptual web-enabled and GIS-based system (BCAS), illustrates the system’s use in diagnosing and treating breast cancer and examines the potential benefits and implications for breast cancer research and practice

On the role of pre and post-processing in environmental data mining

The quality of discovered knowledge is highly depending on data quality. Unfortunately real data use to contain noise, uncertainty, errors, redundancies or even irrelevant information. The more complex is the reality to be analyzed, the higher the risk of getting low quality data. Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD) offers a global framework to prepare data in the right form to perform correct analyses. On the other hand, the quality of decisions taken upon KDD results, depend not only on the quality of the results themselves, but on the capacity of the system to communicate those results in an understandable form. Environmental systems are particularly complex and environmental users particularly require clarity in their results. In this paper some details about how this can be achieved are provided. The role of the pre and post processing in the whole process of Knowledge Discovery in environmental systems is discussed

A Qualitative Method for Assessing the Impact of ICT on the Architectural Design Process

During the last thirty years or so, we have witnessed tremendous developments in information and communication technology (ICT). Computer processing power doubles each 18 months, as Gordon Moore predicted during the mid-1960s. The computer and communications world has been revolutionised by the invention of the Internet. It has changed the way of exchanging, viewing, sharing, manipulating and storing the information. Other technologies such as smartphones, wearable computers, tablets, wireless communications and satellite communications have made the adoption of ICT easier and beneficial to all its users. ICT affects the productivity, performance and the competitive advantage of a business. It also impacts on the shape of the business process and its product. In architectural design, ICT is widely used throughout the design process and its final product. The aim of this research, therefore, is to explore the key implication of using ICT in architectural design and what new changes and forms have occurred on buildings as a result of ICT developments and use by architecture practitioners. To achieve this aim, a qualitative research approach was adopted using a narrative review of ICT usage in the design of buildings. The literature found was subjected to a thematic analysis of how ICT adoption affected the architectural design process. The findings of this research indicate that there is a continuous change in the design process and its final products (buildings) as the technology evolves. The framework proposed provides a foundation for gathering evidence from case studies of the impact of ICT adoption by architectural designers. The research proposes that future empirical work has to be conducted to test and refine the relevance, importance and applicability of each of the components of the framework, in order to detect the impact of ICT on the building design process and its final product